Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was
$648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about
$181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.
A
Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called
Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for
$0.17. The photographer gets a
$0.03 royalty for his work.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”
Great Escape Publishing has published its first annual
GEP Stock Photography Index 2020 which ranks, rates, compares and contrasts the top 10 online stock-photography sites.
Covid-19 has required everyone to re-think their business model and how they communicate with interested parties. Among the questions that footage professionals have are: How have they adapted to the exigencies of remote work? Is demand for archival content holding up? What can media companies do to fully unlock the commercial potential of their archival collections, and which technologies show the most promise in this evolution? See the webinar.
If photographers are serious about trying to earn a portion of their living from photography they should probably focus on producing video rather than still images. Or maybe when they organize a video shoot also shoot some still images of the same situations. Recently, I was talking to Cameron Gough of
Envato in Australia. He pointed out that the majority of the company’s earnings come from graphic related content and only about 10% to 20% of downloads are of still stock images. He also noted that video footage was the second highest type of content in demand without giving a percentage.
In March 2020, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court
ruling held that Congress lacked authority to abrogate state’s sovereign immunity from infringement suits in the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA). When Congress passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, it was responding to pressure from filmmakers like Rick Allen – as well as movie studios, software companies, and many other IP stakeholders – who said states were abusing sovereign immunity to avoid paying licensing fees.
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.
The French publication
BBN Times has published a report outlining four reasons why businesses should use professionally produced photos rather than pictures shot by their employees or amateurs. To read the full story which is in English click
here.
Getty Images has passed along a keywording tip to its photographers who may be taking pictures related to Black Lives Matter.